The Healing Power of Delusion: Hope, healing after crisis, finding meaning in darkness

It's sometimes hard to imagine what you've never imagined.

And yet, that's exactly what's being asked of us right now. To imagine differently. To come together. To get a little creative, a little brave, and maybe…if you'll come with me here…a little delusional.

the healing power of delusion...

I say delusional because this word has genuinely carried me through some of the darkest seasons of my life. There's something about it that I want to explore with you, because I think it might be more medicine than we've been told.

Since 2020, there has been a long string of challenges in my life. I am an entrepreneur, and like many of us, income streams shifted and collapsed. And then, year after year, it wasn't just bad days — it was actual crisis. The kind where the people closest to you look at you wide-eyed and say how is this much happening to one person?

And then it kept going.

By January of this year, it came to a breaking point. Extreme financial disruption. Uncertainty about basic day-to-day resources. Losing two pets, two family members, and a close friend …all within the same twelve months.

I was in a dark hole.

I could no longer mask. It simply wasn't possible. And I won't pretend otherwise.

I'm lucky, I have friends who are OK with my big emotions. They'd often say: I can't believe you can be crying one minute and laughing ten minutes later. And I get it — it must look strange from the outside. But that's just what happens when you're carrying that much weight. You take the joy when it comes because you know how to hold both. I've always been able to find laughter in the darkness.

But I had lost my hope.

That's the thing that hit differently. It's incredibly hard to build toward a future you genuinely believe is just going to keep getting worse…when that's been the evidence for six straight years. I didn't know what to do. I had to isolate for my own wellbeing. I couldn't perform okayness. I couldn't ask my face to do things it wasn't willing to do.

For about three months, I couldn't stop crying.

I could hold it together long enough with clients, and that was it. That in itself was an enormous effort. If you wanted to be around me during that time, there were going to be tears. And honestly? It felt so good to let them come. To give myself permission to grieve. To feel it move through my body. Anyone around me who needed me to perform happiness or hold it together — they fell away during that time. I understand. Not everyone has the capacity for the real, raw messiness of being human.

A friend invited me for tea.

You know who you are. And I really, really appreciate that conversation.

She's an incredible mystic human. Maybe a little non-human, honestly. We sat together and I shared what was happening. And she said one thing that landed in me in a way I wasn't expecting.

You need to be delusional.

In that moment, I didn't fully receive it, because my brain went straight to the negative connotation. That's where we're trained to go with that word.

But there was something in the energy behind it when she said it. Something that drew me in instead of pushing me away.

So in the days and weeks after that cup of tea, I sat with it. I let myself get curious about delusion. What it actually is, what it makes possible.

I'm a genuinely curious person. One of the things I love to do is try to step into someone else's worldview…to put it on like a pair of glasses and walk through the world in it for a moment. See what fits. Let the rest fall away.

And here's what I found when I put on the lens of delusion:

It is one of the necessary ingredients for imagination. For creativity. And if we are to re-imagine anything — a different life, a different world, a different way of being — that kind of creative thinking requires delusion. Because nearly every cultural shift in human history required someone, or a group of people, to be considered delusional by everyone around them first. Long before an idea became mainstream, someone was holding it alone.

If we want to tune into what's possible…why not delusion?

So I started to visualize. Slowly. It took real energy and effort. The days were already consuming, even the smallest tasks felt hard. Everything felt like moving through molasses.

But I knew I could do this. Because I've done really fucking hard things before.

Another friend told me to become more selfish. That my life and health were at stake. She was genuinely scared and checking on me, and I felt that care. So I went into my cave. I isolated. And I worked on my practice of being delusional.

And in that delusion, I witnessed some miracles.

My health bounced back within four months in ways I won't fully detail here…but some of it was, medically speaking, pretty unlikely. And yet it happened.

I'm not going to tell you everything is resolved. It isn't. I'm still in it in some ways. Still rebuilding, still finding footing. But something has fundamentally shifted. Delusion became a direct pathway back to hope. And I genuinely never thought hope was coming back.

So I want to ask you something.

What would you imagine, if you gave yourself permission to be a little delusional?

Not toxic positivity. Not pretending. Not bypassing the grief or the hard thing.

Just…what if you let yourself picture something you've never let yourself picture before? What if the delusion is actually the opening?

I'm still asking myself that question. Come be delusional with me.

— Natalie

If this felt like a conversation you wanted to stay in — there's more happening over in Mystic Marrow. The deeper pulls, the private reflections, the rituals, the real-time conversations that don't make it here. Come find me there.

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